If you listened to that &#8220-lecture&#8221- at Kellogg, send me an anonymous e-mail to cfm &amp-&amp-AT&amp-&amp- midasoracle **+DOT+** (-com-), and tell me how it went and whether Adam has convinced you of the usefulness of enterprise prediction markets.

– Do not waste $400 on a &#8220-prediction market conference&#8221- run by a San Francisco clown and attended by suckers.

– Quit listening to the Ivory Tower economic canaries who are over-hyping the prediction markets &#8212-and have no experience whatsoever in the field of forecasting.

– Instead, do read this Inkling Markets resource, and do grill Adam Siegel on the phone. It is free, and he is the Real McCoy. [I hope that NewsFutures and CrowdCast will soon provide the same kind of EPM dossier on their respective website.]

Scanning the results for the query on &#8220-prediction markets&#8221-, I see that, focusing on the software vendors and prediction market consultants incorporated after the 2003&#8211-2004 starting point (hence, excluding pioneer NewsFutures), Inkling Markets is ranked much higher than Consensus Point.

No need to wonder why. Adam Siegel (the Inkling Markets CEO) is an active participant in the discussion &#8212-thru his blog, thru comments on Midas Oracle, and thru private e-mails. (I told many times Dave to catch up. Pissing in a violin in order to compose a symphony would have been more fruitful.)

Having a prestigious &#8220-Chief Scientist&#8221- is not such a determinant. It only impresses a few young, inexperienced and gullible spotty collegians. What makes the difference on the Web is your openness &#8212-more exactly, how much high-quality information you are willing to publish, free of charge, free of advertising, and free of copyright. Take a look at Inkling Markets. Adam Siegel has made the hell of an effort to make available many explainers and case studies on enterprise prediction markets. I don&#8217-t agree with everything he says, but I reckon that he is the only one to make the effort to reach out to web readers.

In the end, whether the judge is Google or Chris Masse, the passing of time is important. It allows us to see thru prediction market people. There are those who matter &#8212-and those who don&#8217-t.

Who are the prediction market consultants who took part of the conversation prompted by the publication of the devastating story by The Economist?

– Adam Siegel of Inkling Markets

– Mat Fogarty of CrowdCast

– George Tziralis of AskMarkets

– Jed Christiansen of Mercury

Notably absent from the conversation:

– David Perry of Consensus Point

– &#8220-Chief Scientist&#8221- Robin Hanson of Consensus Point

– Emile Servan-Schreiber of NewsFutures

– Chris Hibbert of Zocalo

– The HSX people

– The academic canaries who are over-quoted by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal

Taking all this into account, I am updating my &#8220-Consultants&#8221- listing published at CFM. I am putting the consultants who participate in web conversations ahead of the others, and in bold, so as to signal to my numerous readers who they should contact first &#8212-should they have any inquiry about enterprise prediction markets. And I will consider doing the same for the other Midas Oracle listings.

Starting today, there will be retaliations of measured and graduated amplitude against any prediction market people or prediction market company who snobs the important conversations about prediction markets &#8212-which take place on Midas Oracle or elsewhere.

You can&#8217-t be bragging everywhere that you are a &#8220-prediction market expert&#8221- and be absent from important conversations. If you don&#8217-t converse with us, then you are not such a good expert &#8212-&#8221-you&#8217-re the weakest link, bye bye.&#8221-

NEXT: It is not about Midas Oracle&#8230- It is about taking part of the conversation about (enterprise) prediction markets on the Web.

During the class, Adam Siegel, the founder of Inkling Markets, a prediction markets consulting firm, spoke about his experiences. Of the benefits, he said that prediction markets bring clarity around information, prevent political fudging and backstabbing regarding information. Nobody is the whistleblower for challenging optimistic assumptions, rather, &#8220-it&#8217-s the market.&#8221-[…]

Given that many executives and managers want to hide their poor performance, I asked Adam about who typically approaches his firm. He responded that he is usually approached by either third parties who have no P&amp-L responsibility, such as strategic planning groups, or forward thinking managers who are sick of bad forecasts being submitted. […]

Seeking opinions from a diverse group of employees rather than just the usual decision-makers helps organizations mitigate risk, says Adam Siegel, co-founder and CEO of Inkling, Inc., a provider of prediction market software. “You want as much information as possible upfront so you can react to possible problems,” he says.

Siegel reads the 10K statements of potential clients to help identify their hot-button issues. When they express interest in the markets but wonder what kinds of questions to pose, he suggests establishing markets examining risk factors such as how pricing fluctuations affect the market for a company’s products or how acquisitions may impact the competitive landscape.

A drawback of prediction markets is that they won’t reveal the factors behind the bets. But, says Young, “If a red flag is raised about a particular issue, it’s not hard to go back and investigate” to determine the root causes of problems. “The bigger problem for most companies is they just don’t know what’s going to happen, and the red flag never goes up.”

–

– Excellent article.

– If you have missed our previous post, see here our little excerpt of the Forrester report.

– Adam Siegel is CEO of Inkling Markets, as you all know. His company website is very interesting to read. If you have never done it, do it right now. The general concept of prediction markets is explained, and they go down and dirty on how to set up your own enterprise prediction markets.

The CO-AUTHORS plugin, which does what it says. One specific post or page can be assigned two or more co-author(s) by the blog editor. Very interesting. (I don&#8217-t get why the plugin developer forbids the co-authors to &#8220-edit&#8221- the post/page, though. Mystery, which I will try to clear up with the software architect of this plugin.)

The ROLE MANAGER plugin (not listed in the official WordPress plugin directory), which changes the standard WordPress matrix of roles and capabilities. It can redefine the capabilities of one category of users (i.e., one &#8220-role&#8221-), and can change the capabilities of one individual, but won&#8217-t assign common capabilities on a post/page-by-post/page basis (unlike the CO-AUTHORS plugin). To put it in another way, the ROLE MANAGER plugin can be used to extend (or restrict) the capabilities of the blog authors. Right now, they can only publish a post, not a page. In this instance, they would be allowed to write and edit pages &#8212-without the need for the blog administrator to promote these authors as full editors (which would be tricky since those multiple editors could then edit their peers&#8217- posts &#8211-not acceptable in a big group blog with 71 blog posters).

If plenty of co-authors collaborate on a post/page, then my hope is that Midas Oracle could become more than just a &#8220-blog&#8221-, and be also a vertical encyclopedia on prediction markets. (Of course, participation inequality remains an issue.)

Not allowing all of the co-authors the ability to edit a page is not by design- I just have to do more research on WordPress permissions to find out how to do so, if even it is possible.

I wonder whether using the two plugins together is the solution&#8230-

&#8212-

UPDATE: My current thought is to give each Midas Oracle author the capability to create, write up and edit his/her own page(s). And then to assign co-authors to some post(s) and page(s), on a case-by-case basis.